


Saw, Met, Loved, Left

by cecilkirk



Series: fic prompts [4]
Category: Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Angst, M/M, Ryden, cape town
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-22 06:43:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6069163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cecilkirk/pseuds/cecilkirk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if TYV's "Cape Town" had been about Brendon?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saw, Met, Loved, Left

Change. Change, change, change. He needed something to break up the monotony.

Touring was all good and well; he loved it, a passion bone-deep. He loved the opportunities it brought—new grass under his feet, new languages in his ears, new air in his lungs. It was all foreign, and new, and a change from the usual handful of people he talked to. It was good to try new things, and he loved touring, but it had hit a point of repetition, age, worn down by time. It wasn’t fresh enough to keep it alive, and he would be damned if he let it fade before killing it.

He didn’t want to kill it, but he would put it out of its misery if he had to. If that was the change necessary.

The show was done, hours old now. He remembered very little of it because it had found its home in a rut. Too unoriginal, too familiar. It filled him with an odd color of regret: one with roots in love but petals in disgust. Initially beautiful, but age made it ghastly.

Ryan put down his drink, glancing around the bar. This place had made its home in a rut as well, but it wasn’t ugly enough for Ryan to not need it.

 _God_. He slams his drink, putting crumpled bills inside the glass. He needed something.

He slips off the stool and crashes directly into someone with enough force to make him trip. But hands grab his waist before he can fall.

“Whoa, easy there,” the voice laughs, smooth and low. “Had a little too much to drink, maybe?”

Ryan looks at the man. Something pools into the soles of his shoes, and he thinks it might be his lungs, or maybe his stomach. Gears grind and come to clunking stops in his mind, and he can’t speak. He can’t move. He can’t take his eyes away from his.

“You all right there?” he says, clapping a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. Warmth bleeds through his clothes, hot and deep enough to make him blush in response. He offers a small smile to break the tension, and it mirrors on Ryan’s face without his permission. _God_.

“I’m fine,” Ryan chokes out, his voice squeaking through an uneasy pitch, out of his control. Where had his control gone?

“Think I’ll walk you out, just to be sure. It’ll put me at ease,” the man said, wrapping an arm around Ryan’s waist and putting Ryan’s arm over his shoulder. Ryan really hadn’t had that much to drink and was barely tipsy, but this was more physical contact than he’d had in months. He was willing to let it happen.

Outside the door, he lets Ryan go. Their hands brush slightly, for only the briefest time, but they share a look. Ryan cannot bring himself out of the man’s eyes.

“Hey,” he says quietly. “Do you—” He looks around. “Do you want to get out of here?”

Ryan swallows. His fingertips touch his pants, but they crackle with live, excited nerves. He nods.

The man leads him down roads, turning in some places and going straight in others. And suddenly, Ryan believes none of this. What is he doing? Is he really going to this man’s home, just to—

“I’m Brendon, by the way,” the man says. He jiggles a key in a door, and Ryan is now aware they’ve stopped walking.

 _Brendon_. He can’t even think of a word to describe how good it is to hear. “Ryan,” he replies.

“Ryan,” Brendon repeats, letting it ruminate in his mouth with a near growl. Ryan’s jaw clenches.

The two walk into an apartment. The only assessment Ryan can make of its appearance is that there are few lights on, so it’s fairly dark. Brendon shuts the door and looks Ryan over. Brendon walks toward him and Ryan walks back, until his back touches a wall. Brendon takes a step forward, another, until he is inches away.

“You’re really cute,” he says with a grin, mouth seconds away from Ryan’s.

“You’re not too bad yourself,” Ryan replies. It’s old, familiar, been used dozens of times by hundreds of people before him, but for once, he doesn’t care. He presses his lips to Brendon’s, and he _really_ doesn’t care.

Brendon grabs Ryan’s face with both hands, fingers curling into his hair. Ryan leans into the kiss, putting his own hands on Brendon’s hips, his fingertips slipping under the hem on his shirt to find skin. Brendon gasps slightly at Ryan’s cold fingers, and the noise makes Ryan blush.

This is all it takes for control to be lost.

Ryan isn’t aware of anything until after it happens. He doesn’t realize his shirt’s on the floor until he feels kisses on his chest. He doesn’t realize they’ve moved to the bedroom until he’s kneeling over Brendon. And he doesn’t realize—

“Shit, shit, oh, sh-shit—”

–he’s gotten away with doing more with Brendon than he has with any other guy.

His hands are shaking as he buttons up his shirt, but it doesn’t upset him.

“So where are you from?” Brendon asks.

Ryan pauses. Does he not know who he is? Or was that a vain assumption? “America,” he replies. “Vegas.”

“Very cool,” Brendon says smoothly, slipping back into jeans. “What brings you here?”

Ryan considers telling him everything, but it would feel sacreligious. This moment, this night, whatever this was with Brendon—this was the change he needed. He wasn’t going to let any of his old routine leak into this. Fuck the band, fuck the fame, fuck the only life he'd ever known. Now that he was with Brendon, he didn't want it.

“Just, you know. Vacation.”

Brendon nods, grabbing his shirt from the floor and pulling it on. Ryan can’t believe he’d done what he just had, and a panic floods his thoughts ( _how would the guys react if they found out? His other friends? Family? Fans? Media? What the fuck did he think he was doing?_ ), and he can’t breathe, and his hands are starting to shake, and—

Brendon kisses Ryan’s cheek, just once, as he passes.

It ends every semblance of panic, and Ryan knows he can’t let this go.

“Hey,” he nearly spits, the words flying between his teeth. “Is there somewhere to go? Anywhere interesting?”

“In Cape Town?” Brendon asks incredulously. “Of course.”

 

 

 

“It doesn’t look out of the ordinary.”

Brendon scuffs the sand with his shoe. “Never said it was.”

The beach was sand and waves and deep blues from the night sky. Ryan had seen exact replicas a continent to the west.

“I just like this beach a lot,” Brendon says, walking parallel to the sea. Ryan follows, until he is beside Brendon again.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Brendon says. “It always felt like it had the potential for something great, like anything could happen.”

He looks at Ryan, and his words are enough to split and re-combine him at the atomic level. How did he find his way into Ryan so easily?

“Maybe it can,” Ryan says, smiling. And as the thought crosses his mind it comes with hesitation, but he refuses to acknowledge it.

He takes Brendon’s hand, and Brendon squeezes his back in response.

And then, they talk. Brendon talks about his family and friends and then about more important things, like the sea and the moon and why the little things are important, why impulses are the most important, and why love is so unknowable and beautiful and necessary but so goddam important.

Ryan says nothing. A warmth radiates between his ribs, foreign as the sand that’s creeping into his shoes. He hopes both are equally hard to get rid of.

“So what about you?”

Ryan feels like he’s been pulled out of sleep, awoken from a dream. A dream—is that how he really feels about Brendon?

_God._

“Not much to tell,” Ryan says. Every one of Brendon’s syllables is swimming in his mind, forming pictures and thoughts and secondhand memories. He feels like he’s read an autobiography, watched a movie on someone’s life; it was so intriguing, beautiful, enrapturing. He doesn’t remember a moment of his past at this second.

“I want to know everything,” Brendon says. “I want every detail from your lips.”

Ryan almost trips over his own feet. Trying to dig around in his memory would push all of Brendon’s life to the periphery, where it could be forgotten, and he couldn’t do that, not to Brendon, not tonight.

“Maybe another day,” he says.

Brendon interlocks their fingers, swinging their hands as they walk. Ryan grins, and he can’t force it away.

“So…”

Brendon rubs his neck, smiling awkwardly, nervously. “Are you…staying somewhere tonight?”

Ryan swallows. “Came here with friends, actually, but I can tell them I won’t be coming back.”

Brendon beams, takes Ryan’s hand again. Ryan bites his lip, smiling. This was a very good change.

Somehow, the apartment seems impossibly more familiar, to the point where, had it been his own, Ryan would have felt the need to move, purge his items, _something._ But here…it feels like a home. It feels like comfort and warmth and security, and Ryan can crawl into a bed with a man he’s known for hours but he’ll be damned if he hasn’t known him his whole life. His bones feel etched with his life story, every word tattooed on his veins. A word stuck to his teeth and tongue and lips, nearly to the point of cottonmouth, and as Brendon traced meaningless patterns on Ryan’s hip, he let them slip before he could stop them.

They hit his ears and he blushed, but he blushed even harder when Brendon replied:

“I love you, too.”

Ryan let out a breath, sucked another in, and grinned, searching Brendon’s eyes. Whatever this was, it was right. He was going to let it happen.

Ryan awakes to his phone going off. Panic surges through his body. He forgot to tell the guys where he was.

_God. Oh, God._

He falls out of the bed, knee crashing the floor and grasping in his pants pocket for his phone.

“Hello?” he whispers.

“’ _Hello’?_ Dude, we’ve been looking all night for you! Where are you?” It’s Spencer, and he never sounds this worried. It makes him nauseated to hear.

“I’m—I’ll be right over.” He ends the call; he can’t deal with any backlash right now. He’ll deal with it when he gets to the hotel.

He yanks on his pants and pulls on his shirt again. Where are his shoes, why can he only find one, what the fuck—

“Ryan?” Brendon asks.

Ryan freezes, his blood icy. But he can’t speak.

“Where you going?”

Ryan pulls on the one shoe he can find. “Forgot to tell my friends where I was. They’re freaking out. I need to go see them.”

“Oh,” Brendon says. He’s sitting up, shirtless, and Ryan remembers how his skin tastes. “Are you leaving?”

Yes. Yes. They are. They’re flying out in two hours. He wants to lie, but he can’t. “Um, yeah.”

“Oh,” Brendon says again, and Ryan blushes in shame, embarrassment, complete and utter fucking humiliation. He gets out of bed, walking toward Ryan to say goodbye. But Ryan backs away.

“I really need to go. Do you know where my shoe is?” Ryan asks brusquely, not quite meeting Brendon’s eyes. A hollow, dense fog fills Ryan’s chest. He felt evil.

“I—might be by the door,” he offers. Ryan catches his eyes without making contact, and Ryan’s heart breaks a little. He felt so goddam evil.

He walked to the door, and there it was. He slid it on, noticing that Brendon was watching from the doorway of his bedroom in his boxers. He makes his way to Ryan, and Ryan can’t move away.

“So about last night…”

“It didn’t mean anything,” Ryan nearly barks.

Brendon’s face pales, and Ryan’s feet feel leaden. “What?” he whispers.

“I didn’t mean what I said. I was lonely.” Ryan swallows, not able to look in Brendon’s eyes anymore.

He feels an apology bubble on his lips, but he can’t bring himself to say it. He was so fucking evil. _God._

He turns, out the door, slamming it behind him. He walks roads, some straight and some turned, knowing how to get to the hotel now, his own memory coming back. He feels the sand in his shoes, and his eyes burn, his throat closes, and he—

He thinks of his own life.

_I am in a band. I grew up in Vegas. I am not from Cape Town. I do not live here._

He clenches his jaw, eyes blurring.

_I had a shitty father and a boring childhood and crappy high school career. But I’m not from Utah._

His phone buzzes, but he doesn’t answer it. He continues to flood his mind with his own memory, pushing the ones he no longer wants to the periphery to be forgotten.

_I do not want change in my life._

Ryan digs his nails into his palms, feels his jaw shake, feels his eyes burn.

_I do not deserve change in my life._


End file.
